In Defense of the Princesses (Part 2): The Fresh Batch

In recent years, Disney has received infamy for their inane Disney Channel sitcoms and original movies, and direct-to-video sequels. The Disney Channel has also given us a generation’s worth of tween stars, the most notable of whom have made their mark with varying degrees of controversy shortly after widespread popularity and success. Buxom redhead Lindsay Lohan is now a puffy-faced alcoholic who can’t hold down a job. Hilary Duff of Lizzie McGuire fame became anorexic in her late teens and have faded from the spotlight since recovering and subsequently becoming a mother. The stars of Camp Rock had a massive amount of haters for their uninspired brand of pop music. Demi Lovato battled eating disorders, drugs, and heartbreak that culminated into a suicide attempt. Vanessa Hudgens “accidentally” got a handful of nude pics leaked. And of course, Miley Cyrus.

It is clear that, somewhere along the way, the Disney Studios fell into the hands of greedy executives instead of passionate artists that gave us the classics. It appears that, after Mulan, Disney entered a dark period.

 VERY dark

The success of Pixar overtook the success of Disney’s traditionally animated features. What the Disney Animation Studios did not realize at the time was that Pixar’s success was not exclusive to its amazing CGI animation but with effective storytelling. What Pixar was really doing was use the technology they have to propel a story forward. The technology then becomes an efficient vehicle for a story, no matter how outlandish the concept. By the time The Incredibles became a smash hit and Treasure Planet became a huge flop, Disney decided to forgo traditional animation and dabble in CGI. They gave us Chicken Little.

It was clear at this point that the creative team at Disney had become so preoccupied with releasing several mediocre preteen-targeted TV movies and series that they had lost touch of what Disney was really about. It’s not about sugarcoated slogans about dreams and magic and wishing stars; it’s about preserving the purity in the human spirit. It’s this little spark of purity that yearns for justice and virtue—the same one that celebrates the triumph of good over evil. Isn’t that exactly what Disney succeeded with its most memorable classics? Isn’t that what Pixar achieved with precision in almost all of their works? No, Disney decided it was purely the CGI that made The Incredibles work while Treasure Planet flopped.

A dear friend of mine believes that this decline in quality is related to the power struggle between Nickelodeon and Disney. Nickelodeon rose to power because of their intoxicating slogan (“The TV channel FOR KIDS!”) and highly stimulating programs that conform to this slogan. While the Nickelodeon programs in the 90s were entertaining and memorable, many of them did not quite have the same lasting impact of the same intensity as Disney.

However, most of these programs tended to be more reflective of contemporary society rather than an illustration of idealism. Troublemakers who rebelled against authority are made heroes while the disciplined, straight-laced kids who put them in line are villains. (Recess and Even Stevens, anyone?) While these programs promoted independence and free thinking, most of them portrayed tenets of child culture that its audience will eventually grow out of and that are ultimately of little use.

However, the high ratings that these programs earned for Nickelodeon propelled Disney to launch the Disney Channel with its own set of animated series and live-action sitcoms for pubescent audiences. The Disney Channel ended up becoming highly successful, but as with any television network, there is a dark side. Television networks thrive on profit; whatever earns more profit is milked for all it’s worth. Creative teams work fast and have to compromise their vision in favor of whatever can be more profitable.

By the year 2000, the awkward, boy-crazy, and shallow but otherwise beautiful bullied heroines of several high school comedy series became the forerunners of Disney for their appeal to girls aged 12 to 15. This wouldn’t have been so bad if this were not a great plunge in quality compared to the classic Disney movies only as recently as at least five years prior.

The appeal of beautiful and “quirky” heroines leaked onto the quality of movies by the turn of the millennium. The Princess Diaries set the trend of teen drama formulas for the several Disney movies to follow. Amelia Mignotte Thermopolis Renaldi, nicknamed Mia, was awkward and unconventional in appearance. She suffers from stage fright and is viciously bullied for it by a posse of beautiful cheerleaders. Never mind that Mia has no predominant character traits to make her admirable or unique or a role model; we’re supposed to identify with her because we feel sorry for her. She is a caricature rather than a whole person with a set of complexes and good qualities and bad qualities. Every other character is a caricature; the entire movie is a cartoon filmed in live action. The next several Disney Channel Original Movies that followed applied the same formula or at least the most hackneyed teen drama tropes ever.

While I have previously defended the unrealistic narratives of Disney Classics, I criticize the Disney Channel Original Movies for similar reasons. As these movies are set in the real world, I think it should follow that the stories are realistic or at least believable. Instead, they are over-the-top with the idealism.

After working on mediocre productions for too long, by the time Disney was ready to revive the Disney Renaissance, they were overwhelmed at the public scrutiny they were facing and were anxious to produce a movie that can please their audience the same way the classics did. Launching the Disney Princess franchise was clearly a ploy to remind audiences what Disney was all about. I think they failed in that area. By emphasizing all things girly about the classic Disney Princesses even with more tomboyish traits like Pocahontas and Mulan, the Disney Princess franchise ended up garnering even more criticism against Disney.

In response, Disney came up with a series of new princesses that are supposedly different from their predecessors. The first attempt is a successful albeit unpopular one.

Kida: Heiress to the Lost Empire

In a story that explores the themes of colonial disputes, politics, and integrity over greed, Princess Kidagakash is a character as complex as the plot of Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Like Pocahontas and Esmeralda, Kida is dedicated to setting right what was once wrong. She is diplomatic toward the unexpected explorers from the outside world and actively works with Milo Thatch to seeking solutions for reviving her people’s lost culture.

Independently from the hero Milo Thatch, Kida has her own story arc in which her pragmatic idealism duels with her father’s reluctance to seek help when they can get it. Following the sequence that unwittingly turns her into a damsel in distress, Milo has to fight greed and corruption to restore the culture and integrity of Atlantis. She is the first Disney Princess to become Queen.

Atlantis is a strong movie by itself. It has a strong original concept that worked magnificently. There is no tale for it to derive from, so Atlantis only has the steampunk genre and a handful of scholarly documents to build a story with. This strategy produced a marvelous result of a movie.

As much as I enjoyed it, Atlantis: The Lost Empire has its small fault. I felt it didn’t have as much heart as Pocahontas or The Hunchback of Notre Dame even if they all had roughly the same level of Dark And Edgy. Then, I remember the featurettes: “Less songs, more explosions,” the filmmakers said. And I asked, “What’s wrong with songs?” While I agree that Atlantis: The Lost Empire was not the kind of movie that needs the standard musical format, I sensed the cynicism in the filmmakers’ motto while making the movie. I sensed it leaking into the movie, affecting much of the atmosphere despite the inherently idealistic themes of the movie.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire became a cult favorite despite its relatively small earnings and lukewarm reception from film critics. This was apparently enough to encourage Disney to keep working on movies of the similar tradition. A free-spirited princess with combat skills, apparently, as a good role model for young girls who were born in the world of political correctness.

Hence, the studio reanimated the Disney Princess franchise with a new batch of princesses they thought were breaking the mould. They emphasized that “These princesses are DIFFERENT; they don’t care how they look; they don’t care about getting boys; they KICK ASS!” Now that’s impressive and ambitious and all, but the previous Disney Princesses were as distinctive and spunky as these new ones. Anybody who has actually watched the Disney Classics knows what I am talking about.

Princess Merida: Brave Princess of Dun Broch

By the time Disney and Pixar introduced Brave, it was very clear that Disney has lost its way. Leading the movie was the image of a girl with shockingly vivid and unruly fiery hair, turquoise eyes, and emerald green dress. Her most notable feature was her bow and arrow. The people cheered. The studio promoted her as “different” because she is a fighter. I got very worried.

While Brave turned out to be an effective and powerful story about a mother and her daughter learning from each other, this doesn’t take away the fact that the marketing for the movie was packed with lies. The advertisements told the cynical and disillusioned audience that Merida is “not like the other princesses.” Merida holds a deadly weapon and refuses to adhere to the gender roles expected of her.

On the contrary, Princess Merida isn’t all that different. Merida is as tomboyish as Mulan, as rebellious as Jasmine, and as cocky and selfish as Ariel. The only difference is that she holds her signature weapon and uses it with finesse.

Besides, who were these “other princesses” that the marketing was referring to? Then it occurred to me: the studio has compressed and distorted all the previous Disney Princesses into this one thing for people to point and laugh at, like Giselle from Enchanted. The way I see it, it’s like the shallow and girly traits that the Disney Princess franchise highlighted were now exaggerated and somehow held as an ugly truth that needs to be corrected.

Tiana: Not a Frog Princess

After the success of Enchanted, Disney finally resumed adaptation of beloved fairy tales. However, due to commercial trends in the movie industry, it appears that Disney is once again pressured to conform with its competitors—just like what happened in the Disney Channel as mentioned earlier. The “dark reimagining” of fairy tales became popular as the “vampire craze” dwindled when The Twilight Saga came close to its ending. This trend in fairy tale retellings gave us Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and to a lesser extent, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which was essentially a sequel to the 1951 animated classic.

What do these “dark fairy tale retellings” have in common? If Disney’s brand of fairy tale retelling is capturing the spirit of the tale and building a story over it with a stable setting and characters, “dark” retellings involves coming up with a ludicrous action fantasy concept and then forcing familiar fairy tale elements into it. For the aforementioned retellings, it involved the hero or heroine somehow being able to participate in a battle and use weapons that would otherwise take decades of training to master in real life. These retellings are typically marketed as “edgy” and “gothic”—apparently, an opportunity to ridicule Disney for altering horrific European folk tales into pastel-colored Romantic illustrations.

A variant of this eventually happened to The Princess and the Frog.

Due to its featuring the first black Disney Princess, The Princess and the Frog got into a lot of controversy before it even came out. The chamber maid named Maddie became a waitress named Tiana. Her character design was compromised to appease all possible detractors. Worst of all, The Frog Prince became The Princess and the Frog.

The Frog Prince is about a young princess becoming friends with a frog who keeps asking her to kiss him. She is unaware that the frog is really a prince who was cursed into his amphibian form. He needs the kiss of a princess to become human again. Because of the unfortunate implications of this adaptation if all the characters are made black, Disney had to change a lot of things. They eventually had to come up with an entirely different story.

To be fair, The Princess and the Frog is good, but it’s not great because it’s not The Frog Prince. It’s about the characters reading The Frog Prince and using the magical elements of the fairy tale to break the frog curse.

In The Princess and the Frog, we have a black 1920s New Orleans waitress who works day and night to make her dreams come true. (See what they did there?) Okay, that’s refreshing and realistic. But oh, what have we here? Her best friend Charlotte LaBeoff is the comic relief because the wants to marry a prince because of fairy tales and wishing stars. What does Lottie look like? She is white, blonde, blue eyed, and loves pink ball gowns—an intentional caricature of the Classic Disney Princesses. At one point, Lottie even says, “Did you see the way [Prince Naveen] danced with me? A marriage proposal can’t be far behind!” The audience laughs.

Tiana, on the other hand, has lived a hard life so far and has become so disillusioned that she no longer believes in fairy tales and wishing stars. The audience is supposed to follow her example. Even if Tiana is ultimately proven wrong in the end, the damage is done: The Princess and the Frog told us that your dreams can come true only if you work toward it, not because of magic. While there is no arguing that this is true, I feel that this is too cynical for Disney. Besides, the movies that The Princess and the Frog makes fun of weren't meant to be realistic in the first place.

Rapunzel: Tangled Up with Flynn

I initially avoided Tangled at all costs because I was very much disappointed when I first saw the trailers. Rapunzel was my favorite fairy tale growing up because I identified with the heroine being all cooped up in an isolated tower like the Lady of Shalott.


I felt drawn to her desperation for human companionship that she let the traveling prince to keep visiting her. I loved the thrilling climax of the tale where the witch discovers the prince; cuts Rapunzel’s hair; and uses her hair to trick the prince into killing himself. (He doesn’t die, but some versions involve the prince going blind in the process.) I loved this story, and I loved every version of it except the Barbie adaptation. So you can imagine my disappointment when I first saw the Tangled trailers: Why should I care about this Flynn guy?

Nobody seems to have anything bad to say about the movie, so I finally went ahead and watched it. The experience was exactly how I expected it: like The Princess and the Frog, Tangled is good but not great. While it is a good movie on its own, it’s not exactly the same fairy tale I loved as a child. The animation was great; the voice actors were great; and the story was good. I liked how Rapunzel was exactly how I imagined she would be; I loved the dynamic between her and her “Mother” Gothel.

However, I find myself immune to Flynn Rider's charm. As somebody who lives in the third world where thievery of various kinds is rampant, I see absolutely no appeal in a thief who can go as far as betraying accomplices for his own gain. Even when we learn of his dark and tragic past to apparently to convince us she’s not a bad guy after all, he’s still a criminal in my eyes. Even then, I saw the “not-really-a-bad-guy” trick from a mile away.

The additional details in the story made Tangled more interesting and intelligent. While I think it was clever to combine Rapunzel with a totally different fairy tale called The Woman with Hair of Gold, a lot of this took away what I loved about the original fairy tale in the first place. While the Rapunzel I loved is portrayed perfectly in the first act, it abruptly disappears for the rest of the movie. Call me a purist, but I’m not interested in seeing a physically fighting Rapunzel wielding a frying pan as a weapon. I think Disney can do better than to force their demure heroines into Katniss Everdeens.

Anna and Elsa: Heroines in Their Own Right

Don’t get me wrong; I love Frozen. I think this movie inspired from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen is dazzling, exquisite, and intelligent. The music was great; the characters were great; the story was great. I think it was a smart move to have two princesses and make their sisterly love the focal point of the narrative.

I love how Elsa becomes Queen simply because she is the heiress to the throne rather than being required to marry another royal to become one. I love how this isn’t a big deal, indicating that she can make a competent monarch.

I also love the touch of realism. The Kingdom of Arendelle is “in trade business” convenient for its location in a Norwegian fjord. The castle houses many servants that the royal family treats well. The royal family has a political territory to look after. This isn’t totally a glamorized fantasy world where princesses canoodle with their princes all day; the royals have respective responsibilities.

Most of all, I love how the plot thickens with each act.

That being said, like every other Disney hit, it is not without fault.

Why the need for a subplot involving the protagonist getting engaged to someone she just met à la Cinderella and then making a punch line out of it? We already did this is Enchanted. Yeah, that was funny, and we get it now. If this is a love story between sisters, why couldn’t we have just focused exclusively on the sisters? I think we would have gotten the message even without the contrast of infatuation to drive the point.

A Message for Disney

Disney, cynicism is everybody else’s job. Your job is to lift up our spirits by telling us that there is something good in this world and we don’t have to live in fear all the time. It is not your place to make a punch line out of fairy tales and wishing stars. Next time you adapt a fairy tale, just adapt a fairy tale. You used to be good at it.